devotion, on that constant tenderness and fidelity of affection which pervaded and sanctified his life. The closing lines of the "Dunciad" are quoted as reaching the very greatest height of the sublime in verse, and proving Pope to he '"the equal of all poets of all times." But the satire of the "Dunciad" is charged, on the other hand, with generating and establishing among us "the Grub-street tradition;" and the "ruthless little tyrant," who revelled in base descriptions of poor men's want, is accused of contributing more than any man who ever lived to depreciate the literary calling. Grub-street, until Pope's feud with the Dunces, was a covert offence—he made it an overt one. "It was Pope that dragged into light all this poverty and meanness, and held up those wretched shifts and rags to public ridicule," so that thenceforth the reading world associated together author and wretch, author and rags, author and dirt, author and gin, tripe, cowheel, duns, squalling children, and garret concomitants.
Smollett is assigned a place between Hogarth and Fielding, and is honourably entreated as a manly, kindly, honest, and irascible spirit; worn and battered, but still brave and full of heart, after a long struggle against a hard fortune—of a character and fortune aptly symbolised by his crest, viz., a shattered oak-tree, with men leaves yet springing from it. Without much invention in his novels, but having the keenest perceptive faculty, and describing what he saw with wonderful relish and delightful broad humour, and indeed, giving to us in "Humphrey Clinker" the most laughable story that has ever been written since the goodly art of novel-writing began, and bequeathing to the world of readers, in the letters and loves of Tabitha Bramble and Win Jenkins, "a perpetual fount of sparkling laughter, as inexhaustible as Bladud's well."
But here we must close these desultory notes, and commend our readers to the volume itself, if they have not forestalled such (in either case needless) commendation. They may stumble here and there—one at the estimate of Pope's poetical status, another at the panegyric on Addison, and some at the scanty acknowledgments awarded to Hogarth and to Sterne. But none will put down the book without a sense of growing respect for the head and the heart of its author, and a glad pride in him as one of the Representative Men of England's current literature.
